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Remembrance

Vehicle decals commemorate loved ones lost

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoChris Russell | DispatchThe decal on the rear window of Denver Mathews’ van memorializes his sister and brother-in-law, killed in a motorcycle crash caused by a drunken driver. Mathews also hopes its message might make someone think twice about drinking and driving.

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The deaths of Denver Mathews’ sister and brother-in-law still haunt him, more than a year
later.

A drunken driver killed them when he struck their motorcycle with his pickup truck. Then he
stood over their bodies and taunted them.

Not long after, Mathews found himself in the parking lot of a grocery store. He was — he still
is — working through the grief. On the window of a nearby vehicle, he noticed a sticker.

He can’t remember the details of the sticker, but it memorialized someone who had died. He
waited for the car’s driver and asked where it came from.

Mathews now has a decal on the back of his minivan. The tribute is the largest of its kind that
the owner of Next Day Signs at W. Broad Street and Georgesville Road can remember making.

It has the names of Mathews’ loved ones, Jo Ann and Mark Williams. It has their dates of birth
and death and an image of a motorcycle. At the bottom, it reads “Don’t Drink And Drive.”

“First, I don’t want them to be forgotten,” said Mathews, 46, a Hilliard resident. “Second, if
someone is drinking and driving and they happen to read this, they might pull over and call a
cab."

The earliest that Timothy Masters can remember working on such a decal was 2001. Masters, the
production manager for Sign-A-Rama on the Far East Side, said that design was to memorialize a
police officer killed in the line of duty.

Masters has created about 20 or so more memorial stickers in the past five years. Tammie
Shipman, who owns Next Day Signs and worked with Mathews, said she has made about the same number.
Both said that much of their memorial-decal business has come through word of mouth.

Other sign stores — Sign-A-Rama in Worthington and CB Signs in Grove City, for example — report
that they haven’t made any.

The decals might be an evolution of the prisoner-of-war stickers that people have displayed for
decades, said Lizzy Miles, a hospice social worker and founder of Columbus Death Cafe, a sort of
discussion group about death. They also relate to the roadside memorials that pop up at
vehicle-crash sites, she said.

“The people who do these stickers have lost someone tragically,” Miles said. “I haven’t seen a
sticker for a grandparent or for someone who has lived a long life.”

The decals tell people that the drivers have experienced, and are still experiencing, a loss.
Miles, who believes that frank talk of death can be healthy, says the decals promote public
conversation.

Two strangers have commented on his sticker, Mathews said. One complimented it. Another said, “
Jo Ann Williams — did she work at Maryhaven?”

An irony of Williams’ death was that she was a nurse at Maryhaven, an addiction-treatment
center. If Timothy Ackley, who pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, had
gone to Maryhaven, she would have helped him, her family members said.

Mathews told the stranger that yes, his sister was the same Jo Ann at Maryhaven.

“I just want you to know that she saved my life,” the stranger said.

Mathews hopes that the decal memorializing her and her husband might save someone else.